The Salt Lake City Tribunecan’t seem to understand why a Congressman like Chris Cannon got ousted by Jason Chaffetz in the GOP primary (emphasis mine):

A Congressional Quarterly study of partisan votes during the Bush years shows that Rep. Chris Cannon has voted with Republicans 97 percent of the time and supported the president 89 percent of the time, making him the most conservative member of Utah’s delegation.

But maybe not conservative enough. Cannon recently lost the GOP primary in the 3rd District to Jason Chaffetz, who ran as a conservative alternative.

“For some reason his constituents could never focus on how loyal to the party he was, and it created this strange phenomenon with him always having to struggle,” said Kirk Jowers, director of the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics. “Really because of one issue – immigration – people were able to define him as not being as conservative as the overall data would suggest.”

The problem wasn’t that constituents didn’t know how loyal he was to the Republican Party, it’s that they did know.

The newspaper is equating agreement with President Bush and the Republican Party with conservatism, which any conservative could tell you is not accurate. Voting for No Child Left Behind meant agreeing with the GOP and President Bush, but this legislation was far from conservative. The same could be said of Medicare Part D, last summer’s amnesty legislation, and the recent housing bailout.